The Death of Freedom of Speech

Free speech is now officially dead. Or, for those who would assert that it has been dead for years, we can say its corpse is being defiled with gleeful abandon. Cindy Sheehan was ejected yesterday from the State of the Union Address and arrested, despite having a ticket to the event, for wearing a shirt that said "2245 Dead. How many more?"

Police later admitted that they had no legal grounds for removing or arresting her, but by then the damage had been done. Legality in a more broad sense, it seems, is going the way of constitutionality, which is to say the way of the dodo.

As I said in my article "Invoking the Dead Letter" (link here), the state does not hesitate to violate the law that supposedly binds it, whenever it has something to lose. Even if that "something to lose" is nothing but the embarassment of having your incompetence waved in front of you (as Sheehan's shirt did to Bush), there rarely so much as a pause before the thug-enforcers of the state go to work in direct violation of people's rights.

In this case, of course, a low-level security officer took the fall, charging her with "unlawful conduct" -- a completely absurd charge. The man will of course not lose anything for his obviously willful violation of Sheehan's rights, but that has come to be expected. The lesson of this whole ordeal? Just as Bush doesn't hesitate to violate the law in eavesdropping on American citizens, neither will he tolerate dissent even when it is protected by both Constitution and federal law.